I will be receiving my Dell T320 in the mail later this week. I had a few questions as the manuals and guides dont seem very clear to me so I could use some advice.
From what I can see there are three SD card slots. One is for the iDRAC 7. Two seem to be for the system itself. So first off what are they for? IE The two can run in raid 1 is that for a OS? Is that safe? If i get industrial class 10 sd’s would those be safe? Two, the iDRAC 7 sd…is that for bios or what purpose does it serve?
I appreciate the help.
As I dont have it right now, I was wondering if I should order some if they are useful.
From what I understand, ESXI basically loads off of the OS once at boot, then does not touch it again, except for config changes. So there is very little writing done to the boot device, so an SD card is an acceptable option, instead of having to use something that takes up a full drive bay.
There are other OSes that can, or have modes to do a similar thing, I want to say TrueNAS has an USB stick/SD card mode, as does OpenMediaVault.
Fantastic. Thank you. I thought that might be the case. I’ll have to look into what other hypervisors may operate in the same way. Maybe I can narrow a Google search to find more information. I did see what hypervisors are supported by the server. I’ll have to see if it’s a special type of install. I know I will also have to flash the dell 310 sas card to it mode. I’ve done the same with a lsi 9211 before I think.
UPDATE- I did a little more research. It appears that the iDRAC 7 SD card can be loaded with ISO’s in partitions for use to install to the system. It also appears that the DELL Internal Dual SD Card Reader P/N 6YFN5 is capable of being a boot device for a OS like @TheCakeIsNaOH has said before. Dual SD card reader was found for cheap so will be part of my experiments in the future. I’ll also have a iDRAC SD to play with.